The citizens of many countries other than Russia or America, including some unlikely ones such as Afghanistan, Mexico and Saudi Arabia, have been launched into space in the last fifty years, with numbers of nations proliferating with the advent of permanently manned space stations like MIR and the ISS, but it was only in October 2003 that a “taikonaut” from the most populous country in the world, China, made it into space.

As is well known to stamp collectors China has had a long standing interest in cosmology, astronomy and rocketry. As Edward H. Schafer tells us in his Ancient China, “The men of Ancient China searched earth and sky to discover the truth about the world and its workings, directing their probing mainly towards the rediscovery of the supposedly reliable methods of ancient masters.” The Imperial Bureau of Astronomy patiently observed and recorded over a period of two thousand years.

A stamp from Venda (1991) above depicts the invention of gunpowder in China used in a “firespitting lance” in the 13th century, whilst below stamps from Burkina Faso (1990) Benin (1999) Lesotho (1999) and Liberia (1999) credit the Chinese with the invention of rocketry in the 13th or 14th century.

Legend has it that the prototype of astronomical observatories was The Tower of Wen Wang founder of the Chou lineage a thousand years before the birth of Christ, the most difficult problem for Chinese astronomers to solve being the determination of the length of the solar year, which they calculated to be 366 days. The Chinese based many of their computations not on the sun but on the position of the Pole Star and the wheeling around it of such constellations as The Plough whose handle pointed North in winter and South in summer.

Chinese astronomers were fascinated by comets and in 1986 the P.R. of China issued a stamp in honour of Halley’s Comet depicting Chinese symbols for four comets taken from an ancient book copied on silk and unearthed from a tomb of the West Han dynasty created two thousand years before. The comets named in the stamp below (left-right) are known as Red Huan, Li Comet, Qiagt Star and Chiyongi.

Eclipses were also mentioned in the Chou classics and recorded systematically from the third century B.C. onwards with some attempts being made to predict them. Legend has it that the stars were first catalogued by the shaman Hsien three thousand years ago in Shang times, but the extant star maps date only from the fourth century B.C. Of all the stars, the most remarkable and ominous were the supernovae, large brilliant stars which appeared miraculously where no stars had appeared before.

The Chinese invention most important to astronomy was the fundamental armillary (armilla being the Greek for “ring”). This product of the Han culture was a nest of hoops representing imaginary circles dividing up the sky for measurement and mapping. Keng Shou-Ch’ang’s armillary is depicted in SG 1604. Zhang Heng who developed the concept is also credited with the invention of the Orrery, a smaller version of the armillary sphere and a precursor of the modern clockwork mechanism. In the Eighth Century Yi Xing (aka I-hsing) constructed a great astronomical clock in the grounds of the palace in Ch’ang-an, the first machine ever to employ an escapement, the basic device used to regulate timepieces.

Foreign influences began to infiltrate into China. One of the earliest was a Buddist convert prince taking the name of his Lord, Prince Gautama Siddharta, who as Director of the Astronomical Bureau in Peking published an astrological almanac in AD 729 and very significantly employing the novel concept of zero, which Islamic mathematicians had first used.

Shen Kuo (SG 2059) explained how many astronomical changes were related to the procession of the equinoxes and how the length of daytime differs according to the season. He explained the phases of the Moon and made records of meteorites found in Changzhou province. Most importantly he wrote down much of his thinking for posterity whilst Gou Shouzing (SG 2601) built the Peking Observatory for Kublai Khan in the late Thirteenth Century and built the equatorial torquetum (depicted on SG 2062).

Native Chinese astronomy then gradually declined over the centuries and when in 1583 the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (Taiwan SG 1483) led a group into China, the Emperor was glad to accept his advice.

An outstanding scientist living in the Ming Dynasty was Xu Guangqi (SG 3021) who made great contributions to the fields of astronomy, mathematics, agricultural science and technology. In 1600 he met Italian Christian missionaries, was attracted to their knowledge and so began to learn various new technologies from Western culture.

A German Jesuit Adam Schall von Bell followed in Ricci’s footsteps in the Seventeenth Century. Schall arrived in China in 1622 and settling there took the name of T’ang Jo Wang. He had been trained in the Galilean perception of the Heavens and impressed the Chinese who gave him the task of translating Western astronomical books and reforming the old Chinese calendar.

The most celebrated Chinese astronomer of modern times has been Zhang Yuzhe (1902- 1986) (SG 3703) who discovered a minor planet given the Chinese name for China (Zhong Hua) in his honour and he identified more than 5000 other planetoids and three comets named after his Zijing Shan Observatory.

The Chinese first went into space on their own in April 1970 some thirteen years after the Soviet Sputnik with the launch of Dong Fang Hong 1 (Translated as “The East is Red”) It was delivered by a Long March 1 carrier rocket from the Shuan-cheng-tzu launch site near Lop Nor, 1600 km west of Beijing. This launch made China the fifth country in history to launch on its own and it carried a small satellite which included a transmitter which broadcast “The East is Red”, a song paying tribute to Chairman Mao Tse Tung. There then followed a whole series of launches, sporadic at first then increasing in regularity via Long March rockets so that by the end of the 20th century the Chinese had successfully launched some 80 payloads.

So it should come as no surprise to space watchers who will have been aware of many unmanned independent rocket launches that China is now putting its own citizens into space under its own steam. But how did they get to this sophisticated level?

As early as the 1980’s there were rumours about the development of a Chinese manned space flight programme, flatly denied for ten years, then a major step came in the mid 1990s when two Chinese scientists Wu Tse and Li Tsinlung appeared in Starry Town, (Zvedzdny Gorodok) the Moscow suburb in which the cosmonaut training centre is situated. At first it was assumed that these men were cosmonaut candidates as The Soviet Union had a long record in launching citizens of its satellite states such as Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Cuba as well as friendly states like France and Japan. However it transpired that these personnel were in fact training to be trainers of their own spacemen. A new word for Chinese astronauts was created by the Western media – “taikonauts”, “taikong” being a Chinese word for Space.

Round about the same time the Chinese purchased in a private deal from the Russian Energia Corporation, which was responsible for many Soviet and Russian items of space hardware, a stripped down Soyuz space ferry: Soyuz in various guises has been the standard carrier to space stations since the 1970s. From this the Chinese developed their own orbital capsule given the name of Shen Zhou, or “Divine Vessel” or perhaps “Chariot of the Gods”! Compare the image of Soyuz with those of Shen Zhou in the stamps below.